The Chinantec (chinantecas) languages,
which together form one of several language families in the
Otomanguean stock,
are spoken in the northeastern part of the State of Oaxaca
(especially in the districts of
Ixtlán de Juarez, Tuxtepec and Choapan).
Partly because most of this region is mountainous,
there are about 14 mutually-unintelligible varieties of Chinantec.
Some of these
number above 10 thousand speakers but most are less.
The larger varieties have 20 or more towns
and the smaller ones have only two or three towns.
The total population
is about 70,000.
The Summer Institute of Linguistics
has worked in all 14 variants.

Chinantec (chinanteco) is still the dominant language
in most of the communities that traditionally have spoken it,
even among the children.
However, in some towns near the highways Spanish is more common,
and because of the small size of these language groups
and the dominance of Spanish in Mexico overall,
these languages should probably be considered
in danger of extinction within one hundred years.

The Chinantecs are primarily horticulturalists,
raising corn (maize) and beans for their own consumption.
Through government programs,
fertilizers and hybrid seeds are commonly used in some areas.
Coffee, timber and chilis are also marketed in significant quantities.
Other crops are raised in certain areas,
such as avocados, cacao, peaches, tobacco, and vanilla.
There are also cottage industries in some places,
producing such items as pottery, baskets, and palm mats.

In most towns
none or only a few of the older inhabitants
still wear traditional clothing.
From colonial times men wore white pants and shirt.
Women wore a huipil (a short dress worn over a knee-length skirt),
the design of which varied from one town to another
(woven or embroidered, white or dyed).
In most of the areas where
women still make this traditional clothing,
it is primarily worn only for special occasions;
such garments are also sold to tourists.

The term the Chinantec people use for themselves in many areas
appears to translate as ‘ordinary people’ or ‘just plain-old folks’,
and the term for their language
as ‘ordinary words’ or ‘everyday language’.
By contrast, their word for the Spanish language
appears to mean something like ‘salty words’ or ‘higher words’
(but these translations are only tentative).

Like other
Otomanguean languages,
the Chinantec languages are tonal,
which means that the pitch
with which a word is pronounced is so important
that a change in the pitch
can change one word into an entirely different one.
The tone on the verb is a very important indicator
of its person, number, and tense/aspect;
it combines in complex patterns
with prefixes and suffixes,
and with vowel and consonant changes in the verb stems,
to yield 13 or so forms of each verb.
Motion verbs are distinguished from each other not only
by direction with respect to the speaker (go vs. come)
but also by direction with respect to a person or object’s “home”.

Most roots are monosyllabic and
words tend not to have final consonants.
(Some Chinantec languages allow more final consonants than others,
but in all varieties there are restrictions on what consonants can be word-final.)
As a result, words borrowed from Spanish
are often incorporated into these languages
without final consonants, are reduced to one or two syllables,
and are assigned a tone pattern similar to other Chinantec words.

As in most of the other
Otomanguean languages,
the verb normally comes first in the clause, then subject and object.
Possessors, demonstrative adjectives and relative clauses follow the head nouns
in a noun phrase,
while numerals precede them.
There are relatively few true prepositions;
instead possessed nouns
express many relationships commonly expressed by prepositions
in other languages.